The Japanese actor Hiroshi Abe has one of the great hangdog faces in cinema today. At least that’s the case in “After the Storm,” a new film from the writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Tall and lean, Mr. Abe has handsome features — floppy dark hair across his forehead, prominent cheekbones and a long jaw line. But here, playing Ryota Shinoda, a onetime literary sensation fallen on hard times professionally and personally, he also has lines around and bags under his eyes, a perpetual five o’clock shadow and a downcast mouth. He looks as if he could be trouble.
As it happens, he is trouble mostly for himself, although he manages to irritate his ex-wife, Kyoko (Yoko Maki), because of his inability to pay child support for their son, Shingo (Taiyo Yoshizawa), and frustrate his sister (Satomi Kobayashi), whom he hits up for money with grim regularity. Ryota, having never followed up on his award-winning first novel, now works as a private detective. (The novel is another thing his sister is annoyed about; “Don’t you dare write about us again,” she snaps at one point.) It’s a gig that gives him many opportunities to alter the calibration of his moral compass — in one scene he tries to talk a subject of an investigation into buying the evidence he’s gathered against her. He also spies on his ex-wife, and is less than thrilled to learn that her unctuous new boyfriend has bought Shingo a snazzy baseball mitt.
Ryota’s aging mother, Yoshiko (Kirin Kiki), loves him unconditionally, though, and she doesn’t give him a hard time when she walks in after he’s clearly been rifling through her apartment, trying to find a family heirloom to pawn. She lives alone (the family’s patriarch has died, presumably recently) in a Tokyo apartment complex far removed from the bustling city we are accustomed to seeing in Japanese films, or films about Japan. The neighborhood isn’t showy, but it’s a pleasant, relatively tree-lined environment, and its older residents get together in informal groups to listen to and discuss Beethoven. Nevertheless, Yoshiko is a little preoccupied with what she sees as the approaching end of her life.
As Ryota scrambles to somehow get ahead, Kyoko seems befuddled by her own resentments and prospects for the future. Meanwhile, the young Shingo bristles at a potential stepfather who offers baseball coaching along the lines of “To be the hero, you have to get a hit” even though the situation under consideration calls for drawing a walk. At one point, Ryota, Yoshiko, Kyoko and Shingo all have to pull together during an overnight typhoon that strands them in Yoshiko’s apartment, which is cozy and conspicuously lacking in privacy.
Mr. Kore-eda, whose most noteworthy family dramas include “Still Walking” (2009) and “Like Father, Like Son” (2014), works in a quiet cinematic register, and the slightest error in tone could upend the whole enterprise. Slow-paced, sad, rueful and sometimes warmly funny, “After the Storm” is one of his sturdiest, and most sensitive, constructions. “I really just can’t understand how things turned out like this,” one character says while sitting out the storm.
As perplexed as they are about how they got into such a mess, the characters are nonetheless obliged to move forward as some kind of family, and the story patiently brings them closer to a reconciliation with that fact. Beautifully acted by a great cast (particularly Mr. Abe, who can make a sonata of frustration out of burrowing into a stale frozen treat with a spoon), “After the Storm” brings this intimate struggle to moving life. It’s a film that sticks with you.
After the Storm
Not rated. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment